Al Qaeda greets Obama victory with an insult

International Herald Tribune

by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti
Wednesday, November 19, 2008

WASHINGTON: In Al Qaeda's first response to the American election, Osama bin Laden's top deputy condemned President-elect Barack Obama as a "house Negro" who will continue a campaign against Islam begun by President George W. Bush.

Appealing to the "weak and oppressed" around the world, Ayman al Zawahiri sought in a video to dampen enthusiasm for Obama's election around the globe by saying that the "new face" of America only masked a "heart full of hate."

American officials dismissed the new video as spin control and a desperate tactic by a terror group that suffered a defeat in the global war of ideas when the United States elected a black president with a Muslim name.[...]

[...] in a blunt personal attack on the new president, Zawahiri painted Obama as a hypocrite and traitor to his race, unfavorably comparing him to "honorable black Americans" like Malcolm X, the 1960s black Muslim leader.

The Qaeda video drew extensively on archival footage of Malcolm X, and much of the message juxtaposes a still picture of Obama wearing a yarmulke during a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem with a photo of Malcolm X kneeling in prayer at a mosque.[...]

Lawrence Wright, the author of a book on Al Qaeda, "The Looming Tower," called the tape an attempt by Al Qaeda at "spin control" as it struggles to assimilate an election that challenges its worldview.

Wright said both radical and mainstream Muslim commentators had predicted that Senator John McCain would win the presidential election and that little would change. "I'm sure Al Qaeda has been struggling over how to react to the Obama election, and this is the result," he said.

Wright said that for more than a year, messages from Qaeda leaders had included positive messages about Malcolm X in what he described as "a desperate and ineffective strategy" to appeal to African-American Muslims.

Wright, [...], said Qaeda leaders closely followed Western news and polling, and he said he believed they might be reacting to a Pew Research Center poll last year showing that African-American Muslims are the subset of American Muslims least hostile to Al Qaeda. The poll showed that 63 percent of foreign-born Muslims in this country had a "very unfavorable" view of Al Qaeda, compared with 36 percent of African-American Muslims.[...]

Walters said that if the tape was an attempt to reach black Americans or the Third World, it was "ham-handed" and futile.

"You're talking about someone who looks like the rest of the world, and that's got to be threatening to them," he said. "On 9/11, Al Qaeda didn't make any racial distinctions in who it killed, and people remember that."

(The Full Article)

-

Snop's Commentary:

-

Zawahiri is really grasping for straws with this outrageous insult. The election of Barack Obama threatens Al Qaeda's designs on power undercutting many of its arguments against the West and could prove to be the antibiotic that kills the Al Qaeda bacteria.

-

The goal of the ideological battle is to win the support of the undecided and uncommitted in the world. Al Qaeda depends on radicalizing the young and impressionable to fill their ranks. The radicalization process is dependant on stoking a sense of grievance, pitting one race against another, one class against another, one religion against another. Al Qaeda operates on the seams of humanity provoking, manipulating and inspiring young and impressionable people to follow their murderous path.

-

Regardless of internal US politics, President elect Obama offers a unifying symbol with a powerful narrative wrapped in the flag of hope and freedom pitting itself against the anti-narrative of despair and subjugation.

-

This makes for the perfect eschatological battle between light and darkness.

-

Who in the West will pursue the counter-narrative?

-

Will President elect Obama use his media prowess to engage militant Islam ideologically on the flat planes of the Internet and open skies of transnational TV?

-

Can he turn the legions of digital-warriors and cyber-evangelists into a counterveiling force to push back militant Islamic inspired hate and nihilism?

-

Will YouTube, Twitter, the blog sphere and Web 2.0 virals become the 21st century swords and shields smashing and slashing across resurrected virtual battle fields from Acre to Poitiers?